


Wayward Children

by tarysande



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Season/Series 04, Tumblr: TheDeckerstarNetwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-17 11:10:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21266438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarysande/pseuds/tarysande
Summary: It’s been two hundred and thirty-one days since Lucifer said, “It’s you, Chloe; it always has been” and left.She knows how many scratches she’s made on her prison wall.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 34
Kudos: 566
Collections: TDN's 2019 Like a Bat Out Of Hell Halloween Exchange





	Wayward Children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SomeoneAsGoodAsYou (the_wanlorn)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wanlorn/gifts).

> Breakups were never easy, and while humanity was hot and fast and had had plenty of time to get over it, the oceans were deep and slow, and for them all change had happened only yesterday. The seas did not forgive, and they did not welcome their wayward children home.
> 
> —_Into the Drowning Deep,_ Seanan McGuire

The problem with time is that it just doesn’t stop. Minute after minute, hour after hour, day in and day out. The days are the worst, marked by pages ripped from Chloe’s page-a-day calendar only because Ella stops by and does it for her every morning. Ella always smiles too hard and too bright; Chloe always makes an effort to pull a few words from the silence she knows she’s drowning in.

Rip.

Chloe doesn’t have the heart to tell her not to, even though every day hurts just the same as the first one, no matter what she says. She’s not Lucifer. She lies. These days, she lies all the time.

_You see, we were wrong about something else in the prophecy._

Rip.

_My first love was never Eve._

Rip.

_It was you, Chloe. It always has been._

Rip.

And nothing changes. Not really. She wears a lighter coat and then a heavier one. Her roots start to show and she doesn’t bother getting her hair highlighted again. Trixie grows out of her clothes and Chloe buys her new ones, and then new ones again. She visits Linda. To help with Charlie, she says. They both know that’s not the whole truth. Linda’s safe. In some ways, she’s the safest. She’s the only other one who knows what it is to be human and _know _that Lucifer’s not … whatever cover story they’re using that makes less and less sense the longer he’s gone.

They don’t talk about Lucifer being … where he is (_dead_, her brain always wants to supply, even though that’s not right, that can’t be right, _dead, dead, dead_), but Linda knows. And Chloe could talk if she wanted to.

She doesn’t want to. She’s talked out. Dan doesn’t believe her now any more than he believed her then, though at least he’s stopped seesawing between glowers and snide comments and admonitions not to waste any more of her time on ‘that asshole’ or ‘that flake’ or ‘that son of a bitch.’

And the days keep passing.

After the first thirty or so, people stop asking about Lucifer. Sometimes she sees his name forming on someone’s lips before they swallow it. They always swallow it, now. It’s better. She tells herself it’s better than it was before, when his name was everywhere. “Hey, Decker, where’s Lucifer?” “Haven’t seen Lucifer in a while. You guys have a tiff?” “When Lucifer gets back, can you ask him to—” “Remember that time Lucifer—”

She does remember. She remembers every “that time Lucifer—” no matter what the end of the sentence is meant to be.

Smoked evidence. Touched evidence. Juggled evidence.

_Rip._

Gave her the prom she never had. Kissed her with tears and stars in his eyes.

_Rip._

Let her press the edge of an axe to his breast. Lay bleeding on the floor of his club because she was _there_ because she was _there_ and she couldn’t get away because she was _there_ and she made him vulnerable and it was so much more blood than the axe and it just … wouldn’t … stop.

_Rip._

Said goodbye. And meant it.

_Rip._

And it doesn’t get better.

Maybe she’s better at pretending. She’s not even sure about that. It doesn’t matter how many times she tells herself it’s for the best, that he did what he had to do. It doesn’t matter how many times she thinks about what evil unleashed might look like—did look like.

It doesn’t get better.

Maybe death should have been the cover story after all. It’s not like he’s coming back. It’s not like he can ever come back.

Now, when Ella rips the day off the calendar, Chloe doesn’t even look at it. Maybe it’s the middle of summer. Maybe it’s Christmas. They probably don’t even have days in Hell. That seems like a Hell thing to do. Like solitary confinement—

Is that what it’s like for him? Solitary confinement? Where the only jailer is the real prisoner?

When he’d been gone for thirty-seven days, Chloe made the mistake of asking Maze what Hell is like. Maze, wearing her wounds far closer to the surface, made the mistake of telling her. They both felt terrible afterward. Chloe was missing more than half an hour from that evening. Maze doesn’t move back in, though. Chloe’s pretty sure she’s living at Lux. Maybe she’s pretending, too. Maybe she sings sometimes because Lucifer’s not there to do it.

The pictures in Chloe’s mind are all too vivid now. The gloom, the ash, the never-ending sunless sky, the screams and sobs and shrieks that never, ever stop. And Lucifer alone above it all. Separate. Forever—for the kind of forever she can’t even fathom.

Her page-a-day calendar was a gift from Lucifer. Not for Christmas or her birthday or anything like that. Just one of his “It’s Tuesday and I was bored and this made me laugh” gifts, like new pastries to try or new coffee to drink. Every day is a new Shakespearian quote. She remembers “that time Lucifer—” gave commentary on each and every one. Usually with stories. Personal ones. While grinning. She remembers that time Lucifer— all the fucking time. 

A lot of the days are Shakespearean insults. Lucifer always finds—when he was here, he always found a way to use the insults, like it was a challenge he’d set for himself. Lucifer didn’t—hadn’t—even stuck to Dan. He’d rotated. “Daniel,” he told her once, smirking, “is too easy a target. One must have a challenge, Detective.”

“Don’t you mean, ‘One must have a challenge, thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch!’?” she’d asked, leaning close enough to read the day’s quote. Close enough to smell his cologne, to feel his warmth, for his breath to stir her hair.

“No,” he said, suddenly serious in that way he has—had—has. “No, Detective. Not you.”

And then he’d managed to work the whole damn insult into an otherwise innocuous conversation with one of the Vice guys who’d been breathing a little too heavily down Ella’s neck. She almost laughs when she remembers it. Doesn’t, though.

She’s not sure she’ll ever laugh about Lucifer.

When Ella arrives to do her daily duty, Chloe pretends to be very, very interested in some very, very boring paperwork. Ella ignores this. She says, “So, what are you and Trix up to tonight?”

Chloe turns, tilts her head. “What?”

Ella rips yesterday from the calendar and sets the little piece of paper on Chloe’s desk. She always does this, as if Chloe wants to keep them. Today is another insult. _Thou leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, nott-pated, agate-ring, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue, Spanish-pouch,—_

Lucifer would have used that one on Dan for _sure_.

Ella touches Chloe’s arm and Chloe tries not to pull away even though she wants to.

“Chlo? Are you okay?” Ella points at the number on the page, beneath the quote. Chloe tries to ignore the numbers. It upsets her that Ella won’t let her. “It’s Halloween? I thought you guys were big into it.”

Chloe doesn’t remember when September turned into October. She stares at the big black numeral at the bottom of the page as if it will come to life and explain itself to her. She hasn’t decorated. Hasn’t shopped for a costume. Hasn’t shopped for Trixie’s costume. Has Trixie even talked to her about Halloween? Did Dan take care of it, the way he’s been taking care of so many things?

Chloe says nothing. She doesn’t know what her face looks like, but Ella flips the calendar onto its face and wraps her in a hug in one swift motion, so she figures it must be pretty bad. She thinks maybe she’s going to cry. She thinks maybe it’s been two hundred and thirty-one days since Lucifer said, “It’s you, Chloe; it always has been” and left.

She knows how many scratches she’s made on her prison wall.

“Why don’t you go home?” Ella whispers. “I have it on good authority that the lab’s backed up like you would not believe and the slowpoke working in there is _definitely_ not going to get to your stuff today.”

She shakes her head—not to object, not even to lie and say she’s fine, fine, fine—but because it’s Halloween and she doesn’t know if her daughter wore a costume to school today. The cobwebs in her house aren’t ones she bought at the store. And the ghosts aren’t ones made of sheets or plastic bags filled with leaves.

“Do you want me to call Linda?” Ella’s expression is like _rip rip rip _all over again_. _Chloe’s not sure how she hasn’t noticed before. Dark circles. Too pale. Too thin. Haunted.

They’re all fucking haunted and she doesn’t know what to do about it.

“No,” she says. “But thank you, Ella. Really.”

As she gathers her things, she picks up yesterday’s discarded page. _Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown_, it says. She crumples it in her fist hard enough that her nails bite into her skin.

She’s really starting to hate Shakespeare.

#

The house is empty, of course. Everything is always empty, these days. Dan takes Trixie more often. She doesn’t remember why. There are reasons that always make sense.

She opens the windows to let fresh air in and the breeze stirs the dust lying thick on the surfaces. It’s disgusting. _She’s_ disgusting. She changes into shorts and a tank top, frees her rubber gloves from the darkest corner beneath the kitchen sink, runs that sink full of soapy water so hot it burns even through the rubber, and starts to scrub.

When she’s finished scrubbing every scrubbable surface she can scrub in the kitchen, she pauses to put on some music—bad 90s jams. Tells herself she’s only sniffling because of the dust in the rest of the house.

There’s no music in Hell, Maze told her. Not really. Just stuff people hate. Or songs that always stop just before the crescendo, the release.

“Is that what happened to us?” she asks her empty, dusty living room. “Were we the song that stopped just before the crescendo?”

_What I saw … was my partner._

She’s not sure how long some of these stains and bits of food have been on the coffee table but it takes forever to get them off. She’s going to have to refinish the place where she’s left one too many sloshy red wine glasses used without a coaster. She’s done with red wine. Should’ve been done with it a long time ago. Maybe since she almost poisoned Lucifer’s. Maybe since that glass shattered and she woke up and thought _what am I doing?_ just a little too late.

Bad 90s jams. That Lucifer picked for her. Lucifer, with his impeccable taste in music, probably dragging himself through Spotify playlists and best-of complications, listening to them the way a jeweler looks at a diamond to determine its worth.

What else had he chosen for her?

She turns her own music louder, feeling momentarily bad for her neighbors. Not enough to lower the volume. She needs to feel the music in her bones because Lucifer’s uneasy head is in a place where he’ll never get to the key change in ‘My Heart Will Go On.’

Not that he’d want to. Probably.

He made her goddamned _grilled cheese sandwiches_. Poured her wine. Sat them at the coffee table, the way she and Trixie eat when they’re watching TV even though she knows supercilious Mommy blogs everywhere would have her head for not using the table. He sat them at the coffee table because it’s comfortable and intimate and _close _sitting on the floor without a wide gulf of kitchen table between them.

She clenches her hands at her sides and bows her head because she wants to know what those grilled cheese sandwiches tasted like and she never ever ever will.

Because she’s in love with the Devil.

Who is in Hell.

To protect them all.

“Bullshit, by the way,” she says. “Stupid, self-sacrificial, stupid, martyr, stupid _bullshit. _We couldn’t have talked about it? Couldn’t have come up with another plan? Taken one _fucking night_ to-to-to—”

What? Go on a date, like a normal couple with a normal future? Kiss at the door? Make love? Pretend?

She knows.

She knows it would’ve been too much like a lie.

_And we both know I don’t do that._

When she finishes scrubbing, she gathers every piece of fabric she can find—sheets, towels, curtains; God knows how long she’s been using the same face cloth and dish rag—and puts them through the washer on hot. It’s tempting to fall to the hypnotizing lure of watching the clothing going round and round and round. Instead, she grabs the vacuum. She has to empty it four times, and it’s not a small canister.

After she’s made the beds and put out new towels, she flings herself into the shower and scrubs for all she’s worth, using handfuls of the expensive body wash she’s been saving without knowing what she was saving it for (a lie; she knows). Her fingers linger over the puckered scar on her shoulder—I don’t want to die—_I don’t want to die_—and then, in a whisper stolen by the steam and the pounding water, says, “I don’t want to die,” and almost thinks she means it.

She shampoos her hair three times. Leaves conditioner in her hair for ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Shaves her legs. Cries and cries and cries but that’s okay.

It’s been two hundred and thirty-one days in this prison and she hasn’t shed a tear until now.

#

Dan’s taking Trixie trick-or-treating. He says they talked about it, and they must have, because he’s too concerned to be making it up. Apparently she’s dressed as a demon. Maze helped. Dan sounds unimpressed. “Do you want to come?” he offers. “We can grab a bite after?”

She declines.

“Chlo, I really think it’s time—”

“Don’t,” she replies. “Please.”

_Her fingertips running over a scarred back—horrible scars, devastating scars—and his words, his vulnerability, so startling because she didn’t expect it at all._

Rip.

He doesn’t speak but she can hear the judgment in his silence, so she thanks him once again for inviting her and hangs up the phone.

She drives to the beach where she first kissed him. It’s empty, which strikes her as odd, since it’s a beautiful day. Maybe beachgoers have been chased away by the stink of smoke in the air. Maybe this beach is just cursed.

Removing her shoes, Chloe walks toward the water until her toes hit damp sand. “Remember that time Lucifer sacrificed himself? Remember that time the stories left out the part where the Devil cares and _cares_ and can’t stop caring? Where he’s the idiot that will throw himself on the live grenade or in front of a goddamned axe without thinking twice?” she asks the water as it kisses her grown-out pedicure. She lifts her eyes to the horizon. “Lucifer, do you remember that time I told you I loved you?” Her eyes sting. She’s tired of crying, though, and she blinks the pain away. “It’s still true. I think it will always be true. But Dan’s right. I really think it’s time—”

“Detective?”

_Shit,_ she thinks very calmly, too calmly. _Now you’ve done it, Decker. Lost it completely._

The ocean goes on and on and on. Like time. Like days, lines scratched into a prison wall, pages torn off a calendar swiftly dwindling down to nothing. Ella will probably replace it. Chloe will probably let her. Without shifting her gaze away from the blue water and the distant horizon, she pinches the back of her hand. Hard. Doesn’t wake.

“Trick or treat?” The hallucinatory voice pauses. “I should said I am fairly invested in your choosing treat—”

She turns. Takes a step back. The water’s freezing her ankles and seeping into the hem of her jeans.

It’s a very good hallucination. It’s nailed Lucifer’s expression of trepidation mixed with hope liberally sprinkled with confidence worn like a mask she can see right through. It’s wearing the clothes she last saw him in: black suit, white shirt, red pocket square. The jacket is unbuttoned. So is the top of the shirt. It hasn’t removed its shoes. It even has the same tears in the eyes, the same stars. “Chloe?” it asks, speaking her name the way _he_ does, like it’s a gift and a prayer and salvation and a hundred other things besides, none of which she can possibly live up to.

“This isn’t real,” she says, hating the way her voice betrays her by almost, almost lifting the statement into a question.

“Trick, then,” it says, and looks so, so sad.

“He left. He’s in—he left. To protect us. To protect—”

“You.” It steps closer, looking so real. No shimmer of sun and water, like a mirage. Solid. “He—I—Forgive me, I know I—you see, it’s all been rather complicated.”

She wants to close her eyes and can’t. Even when they start to sting again. Even when her heart starts pounding like it wants to be closer to him—to it—and doesn’t care that her ribcage is standing in the way.

He—it—stops, his expression so open and raw and uncertain it takes all her willpower to stay where she is. “I—know what I said. What I did. It’s been a long time?” It shakes its head. “Different there, time. Feels a million years for me. Give or take.”

Her lips part, her voice speaks. “Two hundred and thirty-one days.”

“Ahh. I’d hoped it was less. I saw people in costumes. Three of me, all wrong of course. I’d hoped it was less.”

He’ll vanish if she looks away. She wants to. And doesn’t want to. “This isn’t real,” she repeats. “I’m tired, that’s all. I’m at this … I’m here, where I kissed him and I’m tired and sad and it’s Halloween—”

“Where is the little urchin, then?”

“Don’t,” she says. “Please.”

He flinches. It flinches. And then extends a hand. “Prick me and I bleed, and all that.” The mix of humor and self-deprecation is so _right_. So heartbreaking. “Around you, anyway.”

“How?”

“Axe, evidently.”

The tiny smile and wounded brow are too much, too perfect, too painful. She steps forward with determination, ready to walk through this figment of her imagination. She’ll call Linda. That’s what she’ll do. From the car. She’ll call Linda and she’ll tell the truth and Linda will tell her what to do.

The hallucination doesn’t move, doesn’t waver. And when she walks directly into its chest—_if I pushed this into your chest, it would kill you?_—its hands rise to hold her steady, to keep her from staggering backward or sending them both into the sand.

“And you would do it again and again,” she whispers at the third button of the white shirt.

“Don’t you know that, Detective?” His fingers twitch as though yearning to pull her closer, so she closes the distance for them, throwing her arms around him, pushing her beating heart as close to his as their respective ribcages will allow.

“Do you have to go back?”

His hand strokes the length of her grown-out hair; she shivers at the touch, at his warmth. “No.”

_And we both know I don’t do that._

“But evil will be released—”

“Perhaps a _slight_ misunderstanding, there. Bloody prophecies.”

She tilts her head up; he’s already gazing down at her. “Then you won’t leave? You’ll stay?”

“As long as you’ll have me,” he replies, and she reaches up to brush the fallen star of a tear from his cheekbone.

None of the words she knows are adequate, so she catches his stubbled jaw between her palms and kisses him until the tide comes in enough to catch them both off-guard, a rogue wave drenching them from the knees down. They fall to the damp sand, limbs still entangled, and Chloe laughs.

For the first time in two hundred and thirty-one days.

“Thou—lily-livered, uh, knot-pated, something or other Spanish pouch,” she says to the retreating wave. It sparkles.

Lucifer chuckles before pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,”—He kisses her temple—“my love as deep.” Her cheek. The corner of her mouth. Against her lips, he whispers, “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.” She feels his smile, though he’s too close for her to see it. “Only we’re neither of us idiot teenagers who’ve known each other a bloody day.”

“We’re necking in the sand. We might be idiot teenagers.”

His laugh rumbles through him; she feels it in her bones, like the bass line of a great 90s jam, and then she laughs too.

“I thought that line was poppycock when Will wrote it. Told him as much. He smiled, not cruel, but like he knew something I didn’t. Bloody infuriating.” Lucifer pauses, running the backs of his knuckles along her cheek. “I’ll be damned if the blighter wasn’t right.”

_As long as you’ll have me. Don’t you know that, Detective?_

They drown each other in kisses until another wave pushes at them like an anxious mother hurrying her children out the door.

_Maybe_, Chloe decides, rising and offering Lucifer a hand, which he takes in a grip as improbable as it is real, _just maybe, Shakespeare’s not so bad after all_.

**Author's Note:**

> For TDN's Halloween challenge. Someoneasgoodasyou's prompt included the quote I've used as the story's epigram. I hope you enjoy it, lovely!!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Wayward Children](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24258103) by [GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)


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